October 21, 2011

"I suppose other things may be more exciting to others when they are at school but to me undoubtedly when I was at school the really completely exciting thing was diagramming sentences and that has been to me ever since the one thing that has been completely exciting and completely completing."

I diagrammed sentences in Catholic school and didn't do it again until a linguistics course in college. They were similar experiences. Very boring, but probably there to give humanities majors the same sense of consistent but trite accomplishment math majors get when they solve problems.

And going through my university's English program, I never met a single professor who thought Stein was anything other than a stammering retard. She's venerated because she owned the saloon that all the great ex-pats hung out at in Paris. She's the kid everyone pretends to like because her parents are never home and has a fridge stocked with soda and a downstairs with a Super Nintendo AND Sega Genesis.

For a couple years I was an English major -- until I married and started worrying about how I might put food on the table -- and I enjoyed diagramming sentences. It was relaxing work, a lot like working a sudoku puzzle; I didn't find it exciting. I feel sorry for anyone whose life is so dull that diagramming a sentence would qualify as exciting.

Which reminds me of a story: When I was in high school I told my uncle I was going sky diving later that summer (subsequent events conspired to make the sky diving adventure impossible). My uncle asked why my friends and I were going sky diving. I told him it was for the excitement. My uncle, who had jumped out of perfectly good airplanes during the war, replied: "Excitement? When I jumped out of a plane, the guys shooting up at us provided the excitement. The jump itself was peaceful." Everything's relative.

Kids are not taught to diagram sentences anymore(adverb), even in the best of schools. That's why young people today can't write worth a damn. They don't know grammar, and they don't know how the parts of speech (What's that?) work together.

Clearly diagramming is an experience long since removed from students in modern academia--My favorite class in the 7th Grade was Mrs Zink's english class where we spent most of our time diagramming sentences. Plus, as Titus was say, Mrs Zink had a great rack.

She uses them instead of question marks, though, because she hates them even more!

Being Gertrude Stein, she would prefer a question martha to a question mark anyway, wouldn't she? I'm sure there's a masculine angle that can be teased out of her hatred of commas. It probably has something to do with that little phallic sarif.

Commas and question marks are tools, and should be used as needed. While I'm sure it's perfectly feasible to craft a cabinet without a table saw, for instance, not only will the work be more difficult but the end result not nearly as true. An unwillingness to use available tools speaks more to misplaced self-confidence than actual skill.

Erik: enjoyed your comment and agree with most of it--having watched the dude on PBS that works with 19th century tools, I think there is a certain art in using hand tools.. I am guessing you are an outcome guy rather than a process guy :)

It's tedious putting a question mark where the words have already made it a question. I like a question mark where it transforms the words into a question. I like a working question mark, not a slacker, conventional question mark.

Every once and a while when going back to edit, I'll see a couple of sentences that are too long and can be combined down into a single sentence with a semicolon. It's always like finding a little Easter egg. I consciously try not to overdue it, though.

ScottM: IIRC the semi-colon is used to tie together two independent clauses. And is also used to follow a conjunction (eg, however) when followed by another independent clause--and finally used when the author has put forward a string of statements wherein the last one separated by a semicolon from the preceding statements. Works in the written format; however, less so in the the oral form where it would be impossible to discern the difference.

Clearly diagramming is an experience long since removed from students in modern academia--My favorite class in the 7th Grade was Mrs Zink's english class where we spent most of our time diagramming sentences. Plus, as Titus was say, Mrs Zink had a great rack.

And you were always asking for her help in understanding where your sentence structure went wrong.

Today I ran across and English workbook from 1956. I remember it well. I loved diagramming sentences. I love puzzles, diagramming a sentence is just like a puzzle; putting everything in its proper place. I follow family members, many nieces and nephews, their children and grand children on FB. I cringe a lot because most of them say Anyname and I as an object of the preposition. Am I an old fuddy duddy? It's all I can do to keep from correcting them.

Just as a matter of curiousity: has anyone here ever actually read a book by Gertrude Stein or known someone who has?.....I think Gertrude was being cool and ironic with that diagramming sentences obervation. In real life, she probably found working a strap on with Ernest infinitely more exciting than diagramming sentences. Although, to be fair, it was probably more fun than making out with Alice B. Toklas.

I highly recommend that 2000-page book. Take a summer to disabuse yourself of the idea that things are governed by rules that you know.

Utterly at random:

"It is with duration adjuncts that we have greatest freedom to use noun phrase, though for the most part they can be regarded as abbreviated prepositional phrases and can be made more explicit and rather more formal by the introducton of for:

They stayed (for) a while.They lived (for) several years in Italy.

With or without for, time units can be postposed by round (with years) or through, especially when the reference is habitual:

The Stewarts now stay in Italy { the whole summer through, the whole winter long, the whole year round, all the year round. }

Without a numeral or other quantifier, the for can often not be omitted:

?*He put up the night at a hotel.

But:

He stayed the night at a hotel.

He put up that night at a hotel...."

Their aim is to tease out the real rules. Diagramming doesn't help at all.

Gertrude Stein's arrogance about punctuation would carry a bit more weight if she written better prose. Unfortunately it was her writing that was weighty (i.e. ponderous), and her objection to commas was mere bitchiness.

Gertrude Stein + Essay = Leaden Drivel

N.B.Here's another uncomfortable fact of life that makes feminists crazy: A man can gracefully age from a wit and raconteur into a curmudgeon. Women can't do this. They try to be witty and come off bitchy. Then as they age they morph from bitches into batshit crazy cat collectors. Women have never done wit; they don't get it, never have and probably never will. It's hormones or something. Even women who get paid to be witty crash and burn like the Hindenburg every time they attempt the bon mot. Think I'm off my chump, do you? Just listen to Janeane Garofalo for three minutes without chemical protection. Case closed. (BTW, I wonder how many cats Ms. Garofalo owns now.)

I, too, diagrammed sentence after sentence in junior high. I didn't mind it, but I don't know that I got much out of it, either. It was ninth grade Latin that finally -- for some reason -- brought the parts of speech and how they cooperated, together.

Homeschooling Mom here who made all her kids diagram as part of their grammar instruction. They're teens now, so it's been awhile, but interest was recently renewed when our son's best friend's Mom (who is a H.S. English teacher), as a fun exercise/challenge, diagrammed the first sentence of Dickens Pickwick Papers.

She showed her work to me the next morning in church. Who else can she show it to? I still have it.

If we didn't homeschool I'd want my kids to be in her class. Gotta love teachers who do for fun on the weekend what they do for pay during the week.

Tools are handy. This doesn't mean each tool is useful in every situation. It also doesn't mean that because a tool isn't useful in every situation, it's not useful at all. Learn how to use tools and when to use them (or not), and you'll go far.